Elianna Kan

“I think that poetry has a very specific kind of freedom, which has to do with almost always not knowing what you’re saying until you’re saying it, or to be more precise, being able to improvise one hundred percent of the syntax. That is a very specific type of freedom, both powerful and dangerous. It’s so easy to write a silly thing with that freedom and yet it’s so moving when you arrive at a meaning at the end of the syntax…”

My parents and I had come back to Romania after being deported to the concentration camp in Transnistria. It was a time of extraordinary and sudden joy, rediscovering what I call the banality of life, the very basic things: food, clothes, school, especially.,,

…I think it speaks so well to our moment, because we are so inundated with different types of culture, and this idea that we should be hierarchically stacking them or appropriately engaging with them at certain moments or not—I think that’s over, that’s passé, and John’s work is much more fluid, and then you realize all the experimental and progressive work in poetry is that way, too…

Pussy Riot. Feminists. Prisoners of Conscience. Russian riot grrrls. These are the signifiers, plucked from their Russian socio-political context, that have come to represent this women’s art collective in the Western media. Robbed of any historical or cultural continuity, Pussy … Continued